Regent's University London Library
& Media Services Catalogue

The preliminary foundations of a polite and useful art -- Drawing and the courtly art of illusion -- Complete gentlemen -- The popularization of a polite and useful art -- Drawing the social and political landscape -- ""Articles fanciful, useful, and neat"": the business of amateur art -- Accomplished women -- Drawing in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

""The book examines how drawing intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates about government and self-government, then considers the relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science, and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the commercialization of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of photography on the social practice of drawing""--Publisher's description.

2021"